What is the benefit of a Trello board over the JIRA Scrum board?

[Marjorie]

I am new to Trello.  I use JIRA and Confluence daily.  What is the benefits of using Trello as opposed to using JIRA boards?

[Hannah Morgan · Accepted solution]

Hi Marjorie! Jira is mainly used in agile software project management, so it's designed in a way to support that (sprints, scrum boards, etc.). For someone that isn't in a technical role, these concepts are foreign and a lot of people will tend to find Jira intimidating, unintuitive, and just not very user-friendly. 

If you're looking for a solution that is suited for a range of different functions or teams and easy to adopt, Trello offers that. Boards are a lot more flexible, so you can design it how you want. A board could be a project, or it could be a place for the team to collaborate on a range of projects, it could be a place for your personal tasks, a place to organize a holiday, a repository to store information - basically, the options are limitless!

Lists (the vertical swimlanes in a board) could be statuses, or they could represent mini projects (what you would call epics), they could represent the different project members, components in a project, the list goes on! 

Trello's really focused on the user experience. Anyone can pick it up easily. It's a lot more visual, intuitive, flexible, and simple to use (which can be a blessing or a curse 😜).

[Alexander Bondarev]

Excellent answer, thank you, @Hannah Morgan !

[Robin Warren]

Great answer, I would add that when I talk to teams happily using Trello (including some very serious Scrum/Kanban teams) the main reason they like it is that it is the tool their team are happiest with. If your tema loves Jira, use Jira, if they love a physical board do that. But if people love using Trello then that is the right choice. Any PM tool is only of value if people keep it updated, so it is all about using something the team are happy with. To that end, pretty much everyone has had some experince with Trello I think, so it an be the lowest friction option to get the team working on.

[Marjorie]

Thanks everyone!  We use JIRA and the team is getting used to working it for our Scrum process.  I use Confluence daily.  I link to JIRA.  

I have played with Trello, but wasn't sure why it was used by others when JIRA and Confluence seemed to work.

I am a Scrum Master and BA right now.  I have been a program manager in the past, so I can see the benefit of Trello for the PM role.  So the explanations above make sense to me.  

Bottom line:  Adapt and use the tools that make the team efficient!